I know what outsiders must think of religious scholarship - it is an utterly subjective field where a handful of clerics twist the meanings of original sources to make them 'prove' whatever they want them to prove. I am always reminded of Rabbi Ishmael's ridicule of Rabbi Akiba. We can't coerce material to agree with us but at the same time it is equally naive to ignore the fact that there is an unmistakable 'agenda' - a discernible 'subtext' if you will - running through the writings writings of each and every Church Father in the early period. A Montanist would tell you that the same Holy Spirit that was 'blowing around' at the time of Jesus is still in the Church today. I am not a Montanist nor should any scholar out there embrace Montanism. 'Prophets' are supposed to make predictions about the future, not discern truths about the past.
A propagandist is a prophet looking in the wrong direction.
I actually think it is harder to make sense of the past than predicting the future. The hard part of being a historian is disentangling oneself from what is 'expected' of the past.
It is easy to find good and evil BEFORE discovering the consequences of morality.
All of Christian history comes down to one question - what do we do with a figure like Irenaeus. It all comes down to - do we just take him at his word?
Until now the answer has essentially been to allow Irenaeus to be our guide because he's the only ball of yarn to guide us through the labyrinth that is early Christianity.
In my estimation having Irenaeus as our only source as the ultimate source on the heresies is about as useful as developing a history of Judaism from Mein Kampf.
Indeed isn't Against the Heresies just the Mein Kampf of early Christianity? Maybe I am being too unkind.
All that I will say here is that if we DO decide to incorporate Irenaeus' various statements about the origins of the true Church, 'the heresies' and all that other things he pontificates about what do we do about his reliance on the supernatural? - i.e. his insistence that on the one hand 'the Devil' was inspiring traditions which 'seduced' the unlearned and on the other that the 'Holy Spirit' established all things to do with the true Church?
I know that traditional scholarship likes to think its enough to simply comb through his testimony, weed out the offensive passages and rebaptize him as 'one of us' - but this charade has to end. You can't turn a lion into a house cat merely through superficial changes of appearance.
Irenaeus' testimony was never intended to be scientific. He rarely develops 'arguments' in the traditional sense. He makes one consistent appeal throughout all of his writings - that Peter and the apostles all held fast to one faith and one belief which is defined as 'orthodoxy.' Those who don't agree with this 'orthodoxy' are deemed to be 'heretics' and - as Irenaeus himself notes at the end of Book One of Against the Heresies - his original treatise was intended to assist in hunting, capturing and killing this 'most elusive' prey.
In my mind, Irenaeus' appeal to the supernatural is little more than an attempt to legitimize his connections with 'worldly' authority - viz. the court of the Emperor Commodus. Irenaeus can say that the apostles believed this, that and the other thing and everyone had to go along with him because to contradict him was - well - 'bad for your health.'
I will develop a better understanding of what I see as the common denominator in the three most famous persecutions in the Commodian period in the next post. But let's first deal with the fact that even as Irenaeus was declaring through most of the first four books that he was living through the first golden age in the history of the Church heretical Christians were still dying and dying in great numbers (in book five his attitude suddenly changes perhaps because it was written AFTER the reign of Commodus had ended).
I need only say that Irenaeus' understanding of 'orthodoxy' became authoritative owing to the fact that he had the worldly authority to impress his will on to the age. How else should we imagine it? Even in a game of telephone a simple message becomes distorted through it being passed around by word of mouth. How can we imagine that Christian 'unity' just happened to be achieved at the most chaotic and darkest period in Roman history up until that time (i.e. the rule of Commodus)?
It is clear from the Nag Hammadi writings and other sources that there were many opinions about what the 'apostles' or a particular 'apostle' held to be true. Irenaeus could DETERMINE what the apostles said because he had a bloodthirsty ruler like Commodus to 'clear the way' for his 'Holy Spirit.'
Indeed I have read only a handful of scholars with enough courage to deal with Book Four Chapter Thirty of Irenaeus' Against the Heresies where he responds directly to the charge from a Marcionite that he and his Catholic co-religionists were in the pocket of Caesar:
And as to those believing ones who are in the royal palace, do they not derive the utensils they employ from the property which belongs to Caesar; and to those who have not, does not each one of these give according to his ability?
I don't understand why THESE things rarely get cited when we try and decide how and why the New Testament canon came together? Who determined that this was off-limits and why do I - as a Jew - have to follow this arbitrary line drawn in the sand by Christian PROTECTING the sanctity of their New Testament canon?
Indeed the Muslim historians - drawing from older DISSENTING sources Christian sources that are no longer available to us - make it absolutely explicit. The Roman government changed the original Aramaic gospel as part of a reshaping effort within Christianity - to in effect 'whitewash it' and bring it into line with middle class European values of the time.
I am not saying that my reconstruction of the original understanding in Semitic Christianity is the ONLY truth that should be heard, but surely it has to be acknowledged that what I am suggesting was held in the early period. The Marcionites must have felt that the Roman government was conspiring against them. So too the various Jewish-Christian sects. The Islamic historians just picked up scraps of the surviving remnants of these ancient traditions and used it for their own propaganda.
Why don't I hear anything about this 'ancient conspiracy theory' in the modern study of Christian origins? Did someone or a group of somebodies just 'decide' that it wasn't important or didn't exist? BUT THE TRADITION DID EXIST and does exist in countless Arabic historians. The dating of the original sources behind this 'ancient conspiracy theory' ranges from the fifth century (Howard G. The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Jan., 1988), pp. 117-120), to the first century or first half of the second (Pines, p. 21) but again there can be no doubt that they actually derive from an early period.
It is universally acknowledged that the Samaritans underwent a persecution in the Commodian period which led to the transformation of their religion. Every native religious mystery cult which made its way to Rome had its cultus reshaped and 'Romaized.' Why should Christianity be thought to be immune to these same historical processes that transformed all other ancient religions before it?
As I have said many times before at this post we actually have choices when we want to reconstruct the story of Christian origins.
We can continue to accept the 'supernatural history' involving all the familiar stuff which appears in Acts and other spurious books which were ultimately rejected by the Marcionites, Encratites and other early sects. We can continue to work day and night to 'make them sound' like something they are not - viz. 'reliable history.'
The other option, the option that no one seems to even consider is that we can take the 'ancient conspiracy theory' - universally acknowledged to have a date of origin ranging from the first to fifth centuries - involving an Emperor like Commodus conspiring with wicked Christians like Irenaeus to falsify an original long, single gospel into four.
I happen to favor this second option but I can understand that others 'trust' Irenaeus' version of events. Accepting this second option does not make me a 'conspiracy theorist' any more than those scholars who accept Irenaeus' version of events are 'supernaturalists.'
Historians are supposed to evaluate established traditions. 'The Imperial conspiracy model' of Christian origins is just that - an established historical tradition - preserved in Islamic and other sources. The only REAL conspiracy going on in contemporary scholarship is an unconscious one. The ingrained habit of members of the scholarly community to accept the status quo and 'forget' that there is another model for the origins of the fourfold gospel established in the literature ...
